Field
This disclosure relates to facilitating communications over network.
Description of the Related Art
Although there has been a significant shift in the past decade towards the purchase of goods and services online, there are still a number of products and services purchased over the phone. However, many of these over-the-phone purchases are prompted by advertisements and promotions on the Internet. For media buyers, it is difficult to manage and measure the return on their investment for online, offline, and/or mobile advertisements that result in calls. In many cases, revenue is lost when a promotion results in a phone call that cannot be tracked back to and/or attributed to the media buyer or web property carrying the advertisement.
Currently, there are organizations that publish content of interest and/or provide certain software programs/applications to an audience of users/subscribers. Many of these organizations and distribution partners (termed “affiliates” or “publishers”), generate revenue through advertisements displayed in association with their web content and/or applications. For example, the advertisements on a web page may contain only a limited amount of information but include a link to advertiser web sites that provide further details often including a phone address (e.g., a phone number). In another example, a preinstalled or downloadable application may contain certain promotions, the promotions themselves may contain a phone address or may provide a link to an advertiser's web site often including a phone number. In another example, a customer or customer prospect may receive an email from an organization and/or an organization that publishes content of interest. The email may include a phone address or may provide a link to an advertiser's web site often including a phone number. If a customer/customer prospect calls the phone address to make a purchase from the advertiser, instead of making the purchase online, conventionally it may be difficult or impossible to determine which advertisements/promotions resulted in that lead. Such sales/lead tracking and Return On Investment (ROI) optimization is particularly challenging when there are multiple advertisements displayed on different online advertising channels while the sales transaction takes place in another medium (e.g., wireline and wireless telephony). In the case where a single advertisement is associated with a designated phone address and a suitable call tracking solution is in place, the advertisement's performance may be easily determined; all calls to the phone address and all sales that resulted from the calls are driven by the aforementioned ad. However, it is rare that an advertising campaign only consists of a single ad and that the single ad is placed in a single advertising channel. Further, it may be impractical due to a limited number of available phone numbers to provide a one-to-one relationship between a promotion and a customer/customer prospect. Therefore, a business with a series of online, offline, and/or mobile promotions (e.g., separate media outlets) will not likely be able to determine which advertisements were the most effective if all of the advertisements drive calls to one phone address.
There are various marketing channels that can be used to promote goods and services including, for example, blogs, social networking, web page visits, search, etc. Coincident with online marketing channel evolution is the emergence of software-based tools that are focused on automating the marketing process within these various channels. This automation includes marketing campaign creation, launch, tracking, and reporting. While early, and generally rudimentary, marketing automation tools were initially developed by a company internally to facilitate marketing of the products they developed, more recently an industry of third party/outsourced marketing automation tools has emerged that provide more sophisticated tools, that may be used in conjunction with certain online marketing channels, and are capable of providing tracking and reporting. Disadvantageously, the conventional marketing automation tools provided by these third-parties are generally limited to the online/Internet medium, have not been able to address the challenges posed by telephony integration, and provide limited or no telephony integration.
Many or most sales do not occur in response to a customer prospect's first interaction with a company. Generally, there are multiple customer prospect interactions before a customer decides to purchase a product or service. Conventionally, marketing campaigns include a series of one or more actions to build a relationship with a customer prospect in order to get the customer prospect to actually purchase the product or service.